December 18 2015

Today, I kind of took a break. I did open up my blender and do a tiny bit of weight painting, but nothing much really. I just fixed some weights in certain areas. They don't look much different though because it is usually only by a few vertices. So now the waist moves a bit better with the rest of everything else. I put the project in my dropbox so maybe I can work on it a bit at home. but I don't know if I will or not yet.

December 17 2015

Today, I finished all the weight painting for the hands. And frankly, I think it looks really good!

Although the thumb isn't twisted nearly as much as I want it to be, I am sure it is a simple fix. Because I won't be actually changing the polygons, I don't think I will have any problems with the UV Map (at least i sure hope I don't)

Tomorrow, I will continue weight painting. And if I finish, I might take a small break because of how tedious and tiring this actually is.

After my break for the rest of the class, I will then take the animating by storm and finish it as soon as possible. 

If I finish animating in nice timing, I might just start a new project. Maybe figure out how to get it into Unity on my own as well as Emanuel.

December 16 2015

Today, I continued work on the weight painting. I basically finished the hands, I just need to finish the other hand.

In those two pictures, you can see where I have my weight painting done. So now each finger moves with the the hand, and I actually like the results I ended up with. They move pretty well. (but I only screenshotted the one finger because that is all I had done when I finished took the screen shot)

Tomorrow, I will strive towards finishing weight painting and start animating my character maybe this week. 

December 14 2015

I forgot to post this day, so I am posting it on Wednesday, because I wasn't here Tuesday.

Today I continued with my weight painting .Most of the weight painting is done. I am done down to the Root Bone.

In the next picture, you can see that each spine bone can move on their own now. All I have to do now is just finish the legs, then the hands. Then I am officially done rigging the model and can start Animating.

That is what I will be doing on Wednesday) 

December 11 2015

Today, I started weighting the character mesh where the armature will affect it. So when I move each individual bone, its corresponding assignment on the character mesh will move along with it.

The different colours represent the amount of weight on the mesh that applies to the bone. So the red is at 100%, yellow is 75%, and the green is just 50% and blue is 0%. You want to vary the amount of weight on the body that way it moves like a real body would. that was the whole point of modeling the character anatomically correct to the muscles in a human body. to assign weight, you must go into edit mode on the mesh with the armature in pose mode. Then select a bone, then select the vertices you want to be affected by the armature, then enter how much weight you want there to be, and then click assign and voila, you have made weight and the body part will now move.

I did it completely on the head, but not all over the arm so this next screenshot is of the head in a different position than normal.

I also just made it so I can't see the subdivision surface modifier for now that way it doesn't lag when i navigate the 3D viewport. 

Tomorrow, I will continue working on the weight painting of the character. Once I am done that, I can move onto animating.

December 10 2015

Today, I finished the armature for the model.

I just did it as if I were modeling the character itself, using the extrude function as my tool of use. Making the armature, I named everything as I went so it was easier to navigate. I also had to keep track of which way each bone was oriented in, because I want each bone to rotate in the x axis, I have to make sure each bone is rolled appropriately. Then, I had to make a hierarchy system of bones. Which means I have to make bones parented to other bones. that way, they are connected. In places like the hand, that is where it would be used most.

All those dotted lines signify which bones are parented to which. so all the bases of all the bones are parented to the end of the hand bone. That means when I rotate the hand bone, all the finger bones rotate with it.

I only made bones on one side of the model because I could just mirror the armature, names too. It is a really cool function that blender has. So, if I name a finger bone "index1.L" if I duplicate it with [Shift+D] then do [Ctrl+M] then just hit the [X] key, to mirror in the x axis, (all while the origin is in the center of the grid with the 3D Cursor) the bones would all be mirrored. But, with all those bones selected, and I hit the [W] key that comes up with special menu, and I select name mirror, it would switch from "index1.L.001" to "index1.R" and that is really helpful.

Now, the reason why orienting the bones are important, is so you can rotate them properly. So I wanted it to rotate in the X-Axis, just like a hand would. So if you don't orient the bones properly, they wouldn't rotate properly like so:

As you can see, all the bones are rotated as they would in a real life hand. 

Tomorrow, I will use the weight paint tool in blender, that way when I move the bones, the appropriate sections of the body will follow the bones.

December 9 2015

Today, I finished everything that has to do with texturing. That includes the eyes.

after I textured the inner eye, I went onto the outer eye. And what I did there was create a new texture, called it Eye.Outer and then went to the node editor to make it how I want it to look. It was pretty interesting because I switched the kind of texture it was from Diffuse BSDF to a Glass texture. Which made it transparent, and refract light.

On the left, is the inner eye without an outer eye piece. And the right is with the outer eye. As you can see, is refracts the iris to make it look like it comes out with the bulge, but it is actually just flat. And reflects some of the light from the other eye. 

Once I finished the texturing of the Left eye, I just deleted the right eye, and mirrored the left eye, separated the two, and renamed the other eye to eye.R and eyeOuter.R.  

I also started the beginnings on the armature rigging.

That is one bone. I will extrude multiple bones coming from that, to make the entire skeletal structure of the character, then I can go ahead and animate him. Then I can pass him off to Emanuel, and he can put him into a unity game.

Tomorrow, I will continue progress on the armature rigging.